God in the Hands of Angry Sinners

Things Stage Musicals and Sci-Fi have Taught me About the Transcendence of God and how it Impacts my View of the Transgender Movement, Presuppositional Apologetics, and the Resurrection of Lazarus

For certain reasons, in the early part of last year, I was studying Jonathan Edwards' famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." In the sermon, Edwards exhorts sinners to go to God and repent while they still had the chance. His fear was that they would procrastinate their choice, thinking they would repent on their death bed or some such thing--putting off the decision until it was too late. Edwards' sermon seems discordant to modern ears and not just because of archaic language or Calvinistic theology. In a large measure, the world has turned on its axis since Edwards' day, changing the theological playing field significantly. Here we are on the cusp of the central issue of the church today.

But we had better approach the question stealthily, and we can probably begin best by starting with the burden of Edwards' sermon--Procrastination. The sinners Edwards addressed knew that they were sinners and that their only hope of escaping Hell and obtaining Heaven was through repentance, through entering into a covenant relationship with God, through what some masters-of-understatement have termed "getting saved." They knew this was what they had to do and most of them intended to do it, eventually--they simply wanted to put it off as long as they could. Why? Why did they (and why do some still today) put off doing something that they knew perfectly well they needed to do--something they had every intention of doing eventually? Obviously, there is always a bit of fear and trepidation when entering into something momentous and irrevocable. So sometimes even men truly in love hesitate on the threshold of marriage and even truly good people hesitate on the threshold of death. There is cause logically to hesitate at the brink of salvation for this reason, a thing Jesus Himself encouraged. (Luke 14:26-33) However, this is not, most likely, the main reason why people put off their decision to follow God, not the reason why many people (if they could arrange it with certainty) would put it off until the very last moment of their life.

That reason is simply enough--man does not trust God to arrange his life; we are afraid that we will miss out on the good things in life if we follow God. That is why people want to get all the good they can out of life before they reluctantly leave it all behind to follow God--that is why they have to be warned with threats of hellfire and brimstone in order to turn to God at all. That is what the young Augustine meant when he prayed: "Lord, make me chaste... but not yet." These kinds of sinners are like people enjoying their last meal before going to the doctor to be put on a strict diet. Their cry is: "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we shall be saved." This is and has been the attitude of many people in the world--viewing God and His gift of salvation as a dreary necessity which we put off as long as possible. That is why the antinomian doctrine of many Baptists has spread so quickly and completely (perhaps even more quickly and completely than its proponents would like). This idea that we can get all the blessings of Heaven without actually having to follow God now--this is what people really want. It is like a pill which allows you to eat whatever you want and still lose weight. And I'm afraid, in the final analysis, the results will be about the same.

This is not my main point, but I can't resist pointing out the irony of this situation--that people who don't trust God to run their life should be so anxious that He run their afterlife--that those who avoid God in time should want to be constantly with Him in eternity. But, in fact, I think most of them really hope that, in the Resurrection, God will be rather like the manager at a restaurant--that He may stop by our table now and again to make sure that everything is all right, but that most of the time He will leave us to enjoy our meal in peace.

The whole thing is perfectly captured by Alfred Doolittle's song in My Fair Lady in which he carefully details the various requirements of virtue (requirements which he admits come from “the Lord above”) but then adds that “with a little bit of luck” you can avoid it all. That is the sentiment of the procrastinator--hoping he can be lucky enough to avoid the dull, heavy burden of morality (what Sir Mordred in Camelot calls: “The Seven Deadly Virtues”) and be free to enjoy life. It is only the threat of endless misery in the future which can possibly rouse him to turn from his own course in life. (It is more likely to be the threat of Hell than the promise of Heaven, for the reason I pointed out above. If we do not like God's ways, we are not likely to like His House. I do not think Doolittle or Mordred would have been happy in any conceivable version of Heaven--not without some adjustment, anyway.)

And this attitude, if followed consistently and examined consciously, will almost certainly lead to bitterness and anger. It seems highly unreasonable of God to force us to give up our own happiness, to place upon us the heavy burden of morality or religion. One little boy was asked what God was like, and he responded that God was the sort of fellow who is always sneaking around to see if anyone is having fun and trying to stop it. This line of thought will lead man to view God as a bully, who coerces us merely by His power to submit to His ways when obviously there is nothing naturally we would like less. Some Christians have tried to head off this danger by offering the stoical calm of a philosophical god or the detached, clinical philanthropy of an antinomian god, but how far either of these can go is questionable.

That is why sinners are angry with God--because he is the enemy of their happiness, because He forces hunger and gloom and sadness on mankind, simply by His right of power. Because He holds ultimate power, He can broker the terms He wants, but with no seeming concern for us. Like the girl says in Oklahoma, it seems to be: “All for you and nothing for me.” We can only escape Hell by surrendering everything we care about, everything we want, everything we are.

Everything we are. And there's the rub. For if, as humans, we must surrender our humanity to follow God's ways, then that makes His ways inhuman. And certainly, that seems to be the case. The repeated reminders in Scripture that God's ways are not our ways; Solomon's wail that the day of death is better than the day of birth; Jesus' blessings on those who weep; the command to hate our father and mother in order to follow Christ--it all seems to point to the idea that human values and God's values are so completely different that there is no point of contact.

And when one turns from the Scripture to the mass of western Christian thinking, the case becomes blacker. Whatever the deeper truth of the matter, superficially Christianity seems to be a kind of Nihilism, denying and breaking apart the values of humanity, an enemy of man and of life. The whole attitude was well captured in a Christian song of the last century which ended: “And the things of Earth will grow strangely dim/In the light of [God's] glory and grace.” Christianity seems to teach that God gives us a radically new set of values which negates all the values of man, rendering meaningless everything in this life.

It is not merely that God imposes morality on man. Many sane men have realized that morality must be imposed on man, for his own sake if nothing else. But under Christianity, it would seem, even morality has no meaning. “Only one life, 'twill soon be past/Only what's done for Christ will last.” If an act of courage, of charity, of self-denial is done for any other motive than explicit devotion to Christ then it is worthless. Some Christians would even say it is a sin. Paris Reidhead, himself a missionary and social activist, vigorously condemned the idea of helping people either out of compassion or a sense of justice, saying that the only valid reason for any human action was the glory of God.

Morality (which, to men like Mordred and Doolittle, was God's inconvenient burden) now becomes 'filthy rags' which are meaningless to God and, therefore, to Christians. Some Christians (including even some within the Wesleyan/Holiness tradition) explicitly deny that sinners could have any knowledge of right and wrong meaning that whatever knowledge of right and wrong they seem to have is erroneous. Knowledge of morality--and perhaps all knowledge--is impossible to sinners; there is an impassible chasm between sinners and Christians. That is why the proponents of Presuppositional Apologetics say that the gulf between sinners and God (and His followers) is so great that there is no common ground between them in thought or in language. “Remember that everyone looks at the world through the set of lenses--a worldview. We must not accept the idea that there is neutral ground to argue from.” (“Starting with Scripture,” AIG Leaflet) This gap between sinners and Christians is so great that no argument can bridge it, though a few grenades of truth can be thrown over it.

If such a chasm exists between humans and Christians with respect to morality and knowledge, it hardly needs to be stated that it exists with other things as well. All the ordinary things of life, the things which matter most to man, seem to mean nothing to God. And ultimately the matter is a matter of life or death.

For, to humans, life is the summum bonum and death the final and great evil. But according to Christianity life is a short, meaningless charade and death is our goal and aim. So some modern preachers will all-but tell you that Lazarus came out of his tomb weeping and wailing because he had been returned to life. Once I was worked with a person who was continually talking about wanting to die and hoping someone would kill them. I (tactfully and gently, of course) intimated that this might not be a healthy mindset and they looked at me and said: “If you're a Christian, shouldn't you be happy to die?”

It seems, then, that God's ways are not our ways--that God, in His power, demands of man complete denial of their humanity and acceptance of an alien, inhuman code of value. The fact that God rewards those who do only makes it worse. Christians seem to be traitors, selling out their own species for the sake of a bribe. (And the fact that, whatever the deeper truth of things, most Christians do not actually live out such a philosophy hardly seems to rectify the matter.)

Note that we have already come a long ways from the angry sinners who simply complained because God got in the way of their fun and so wanted to procrastinate salvation. But the course of thought goes further. Earlier I referenced the character of Alfred Doolittle. The character originally appeared in Shaw's Pygmalion and his character is distinctly different from the Doolittle of “With a Little Bit of Luck.” Shaw's version of the character, while still definitely a self-indulgent rogue, was also a philosopher. (Most of Shaw's characters are.) He did not merely reject “middle-class morality” but argued (sincerely or insincerely) that it was largely unfair and unreal. And he is not the only one. A rising number of people have argued that traditional morality (and specifically Christian morality) is not only unnecessary but actually immoral. They complain, not that religion forces us to be moral, but that it prevents us from being moral.

One example will suffice. Take the Christian opposition to the transgender movement. The appeal of this movement seems simple and unanswerable. What could be more unnatural, more immoral than arbitrarily forcing people into alien and repulsive roles, in requiring people to be something different than what they are, in demanding self-renunciation and self-hate? The insistence of Christians that people subjugate their sense of individuality for the sake of an apparently arbitrary taboo seems to the world, not just irrational, but positively immoral. The genial, openness, and tolerance of the world certainly looks more authentically right.

And so the circle is complete. The world is angry with God at first because He is too good and in the end because He is not good enough. Religion denies joy and happiness from mankind in the name of morality and yet cannot even seem to carry through with the promise of morality. Christianity as a whole seems to be the stereotypical religious man who has a somber, sour attitude and yet is a hypocrite in his personal life. If they are right, you can hardly blame sinners for being angry with God. But are they right?

The short answer is: no--because God is transcendent. But mere theological jargon will probably not make the problem go away. So we had better start at one small corner of the answer.

In Cameron Mackintosh's musical of Mary Poppins, Mrs. Banks has a song which ends with a determination to help her husband overcome the emotional trauma caused by his childhood and she sings these words: “I'll fight for the man who needs freeing/The 'real you' who no-one is seeing.” There is something simple and touching about the words, something intrinsically sane about the desire to help a person be themselves. So often we all know the real person is suppressed by societal expectations, by personal fears. It is only natural to help people be themselves, to “fight for... the 'real you.'”

The word fight in the song made me think of another situation which may make the matter clearer. In one of the tales of the Legion of Super-Heroes, Timber Wolf fell was brainwashed by an inter-dimensional warlord. Under his influence, Timber Wolf attacked and attempted to assassinate the president of Earth and was only stopped because his friends (specifically Superboy and Mon-El, the only ones present who were a match for a berserk Timber Wolf) fought and subdued him. And they were justified, not only because the safety of the president was at stake, but because it was what Timber Wolf himself, while in his right mind, would have wanted--and because subduing him was the only hope for returning him to sanity. They were literally fighting him for the sake of “the man who needs freeing/The 'real you' who no-one is seeing.”

This all seems right and natural enough. We can understand in such a case that it makes sense to make a distinction what a person seems to be and what they really are and that their real identity should mold and shape their appearance rather than vice versa. That is the essential argument of the transgender movement. That someone who is essentially a man should not be forced to live life as a woman, but should be allowed to have surgery for the sake of “the man who needs freeing.”

It seems simple enough, but it isn't quite that simple. Thinking of that story of Timber Wolf reminded me of another time when he was brainwashed--this time by the influence of the Lotus Fruit. Due to this influence, he almost betrayed the Legion and was only saved by the courage and self-sacrifice of his then-steady girlfriend, Light Lass. Why this is significant is that the story was a not-especially-subtle satire on drug addiction. And that's where things get a little more tricky. Many of us believe that drugs have a bad effect on the mind and that a person under their influence is not their real self. But there are those who disagree and think the effect of drugs is negligible or even that it may allow the person to be more truly themselves. If a person is high enough, they will probably think that. So are their family and friends justified in try to get them off drugs or are they guilty of a gross mistake?

The problem is really very simple. If what a person appears to be at a moment, even to themselves, is different from their real self, then how does anyone know for sure who their real self is? Most of us have probably had times when people tried to help us, tried to give us what they thought we wanted, and it was actually exact reverse of what we wanted. If no one sees the 'real you' then how on earth are we supposed to fight to free it? That only brings up the question of whether there even is such a thing as a 'real you' separate from the perceptions and feelings of the moment. But if our identity fluctuates as much as our perceptions and feelings do, then there is no point as saying there is such a thing as identity.

It is an obvious fact that some people may feel like a completely different person on Tuesday than they did on Monday. Not everyone's perceptions and feelings differ that drastically or that quickly, but the very fact that some people's do is sufficient to raise this problem. There are two pitfalls we must avoid. On one hand, if a person's real identity can change by the moment than it is not a real identity. If that is true, then identity is a myth. And if identity is unreal, then that destroys all impetus for human action outside of the particular feeling of the moment. There is no point in saying “This is what I should do” or “this is what I need to do” if there is no consistent “I” to need to do it. A person cannot be true to themselves if they have no self and they cannot be true to others if the others do not exist. This would lead a person to morbidity or licentiousness and a society to anarchy or tyranny. The other pitfall is to affirm that identity is real but that it is somehow separate from our personal consciousness--that our feelings and thoughts are only meaningless waves crashing against the unmoving rock of our identity. If our real identity is solid and unchanging, unaffected by our feelings and choices, then what does it mean to say that it is our identity at all? That would render everything we do irrelevant since it has no impact on real identity.  We could be true to ourselves or others on this philosophy, but what would the point be since our identity remains the same regardless of whether we do or not?

So that leaves us with the question: is there, can there be such a thing as human identity which is somehow separate from and yet connected to our actual consciousness?

And that brings me back to the story of Timber Wolf. In his case, we can see what give him a true identity that was separate from momentary appearance. He had a true identity because he was a fictional character, created by Edmond Hamilton. Hamilton (and those who wrote the character later) could have chosen to make Timber Wolf a ruthless anti-hero and killer, but instead, they chose to make him a more-or-less consistent hero who, despite certain violent and anti-social tendencies, remained loyal to the Code of the Legion. He identity, his “real” self was determined by his creator.

And only if we have a creator can we have a real identity. Only if someone is standing outside the stream of consciousness, who sees the end from the beginning--only then can there be such a thing as a “real you.” If we were deliberated and consciously created by an intelligent and willful being (i.e., God), then we have an identity--for everything deliberated and consciously created has an identity, an identity given to it by its creator. The “'real you'” who “needs freeing” is the person God created you to be. If you see a building in the early stages of construction, all you will see is a mass of wood and stone and plaster and it would be very difficult to know exactly what the building was going to be. If you wanted to know the real identity of the building, you would have to look at the blueprint or talk to the architect. Because there is a God, and because God is the transcendent creator, outside of the world-process, then everything has an identity--an identity given to it by the creator.

But of course, fictional characters have no control over their character and the wood and stone of a building are not conscious agents in the construction of the building. But what if they were? Then we would have this situation--in which the elements of a building could lose their identity--by failing to follow the instructions of the Architect, they could become something other than what they were intended to be. And in that case, it would be necessary to “fight for the man who needs freeing/The 'real you' who no one is seeing.” In other words, if the pieces of a building had the power of choice, that would create exact the situation which we have as humans (who do have the power of choice)--the situation in which real identity exists but can be and often is separate from what a person actually is at a given moment. The decisions and choices we make in life are either building our being into that thing which it was created to be or destroying that ideal. The hammer and nails of daily life are either creating the building the architect designed or are created a meaningless pile of rubble.

For we have the power to affirm or deny our identity--to fulfill it or fall away from it--but we do not have the power to change it. The wood and stone may fail to become a building, but they will remain forever wood and stone. Life is like an RPG. We can take the path to the good ending or the bad ending, but we do not have the power to mod the game and create an entirely new character or an entirely new path.

And that brings us back to the transcendence of God. To say that God is transcendent means that God is outside of the world process--as a writer is outside of the world of his book or as a programmer is outside of the world of his program. The keynote of Christian doctrine is that God is not part of the world--He is not simply a “bigger and better kind of me” as one poet put it. Nothing in this world has existence apart from Him for in Him we live and move and have our being. God does not merely help to shape us as we help to shape one another.  A man may say that his wife or his parents or his friends “made” him who he is, but this is a totally different thing from the statement that we are “made” by God. Even a man has good parents or good friends, he may still reject their ideas and leading and go his own path and still end up being a tolerably good person. If wood were conscious, it might reject the architect and come up with a better building on its own. But because we are made ex nihilo by God, there is no secondary option. Our choice--in every choice we make--is between fulfilling God's plan or turning away from it. This is not like choosing between chocolate and vanilla--when we might decide to choose strawberry instead--it is like choosing between light and darkness because in the end there is no third option, there is no choice except light and darkness in some proportion.

Your “real you”--your real identity--is the person God created you to be, and if you fail of this, you have nothing left except failure and ultimate ruin, like impure salt which can no longer “salt” anything and is, therefore, good for nothing except to be cast out and trodden under the foot of man. If a man loses his identity then he has lost everything--and then what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own self? For that reason, we should “fight for the man who needs freeing/The 'real you' who no one seeing.” It may be done at the wrong time, it may be done in the wrong way, it may be done for the wrong motive or with the wrong attitude--but it can never be fundamentally wrong.

Suppose there was a man born blind. He had always been blind and never able to see--that was part of his entire life. His blindness was such a part of his existence that he had come to identify himself by it, to call himself (in his mind and even out loud) “the blind man.” Perhaps due to the hatred and ridicule of others, he had even developed a defiant pride in his condition. There is nothing necessarily wrong in all that. But if his blindness were such that a cure were possible (and it were financially within his reach), we would know that the best course of action for him would be to seek it. And if, because of his pride, he refused, we know his friends and family would be right in using every means of persuasion short of physical violence to persuade him. Why? Because, the natural, proper state of man is seeing and not blind. Sight is fundamental to the human body and blindness only accidental. For the blind man, losing his blindness might seem like losing part of his identity, but we realize that he is actually regaining his true identity.

And that is a pale parallel for the Christian position on the transgender movement (which will do as a representative case for all moral issues). A gender-confused man may think that a surgery which will turn him into a woman will liberate his true identity and allow him to become his real self. But the Christian believes that this will actually take him away from his real identity and lead towards ruin, like a nearsighted man gouging out his eyes in a quest for better sight. I am not pretending to answer or even ask all the questions concerning gender. I am just trying to put the whole matter in the right perspective. If there is a God, then people have real identity, and if people have real identity then their actions can lead them away from that, and if they can, then we are right to warn them of that danger. And if there is no God, then people have no real identity, and there is no point in anybody doing anything. To warn a man of sin is always (in principle) an act of mercy, for though sin is always a sin against God, it is also always a sin against oneself. Whether every professed Christian who has ever warned anyone about sin has done so in the right way for the right reason is a separate question. The fact that a doctor prescribes an expensive treatment merely in order to pad his own bank account does not necessarily mean the prescription is wrong--much less that all prescriptions are wrong.

The feeling of the world that it is wrong to force people to deny their identity is not wrong and the Christian affirms it. The question turns on what a person's true identity actually is. And there is a parallel to this in many issues besides those of gender, many cases where the Christian's insistence on a moral position may seem extreme or counterintuitive to the world. The problem is that morality depends upon knowledge. It is easy to imagine a child who would never dream of committing cold-blooded murder casually throwing an object of a high building. The child naturally lacks the breadth of knowledge necessary to connect his careless action with its potential consequences in any very real sense. And even when we know the facts involved, we can make a similar mistake. I remember hearing a story (fictional, as I recall) about a young man who padded his pocket money by robbing newspaper stands. He felt no real guilt about his actions even though he technically knew they wrong--until he met the man who ran the stands and saw first hand the consequences of his actions. Then he realized conceptually just what it was he was doing. (The same thing essentially happens with David in 2 Samuel 12:1-13) It is always proper to fight for the right and against the wrong whenever we see it, but with our limited knowledge we cannot be sure we always do see it--or even truly “see” it on a concrete level even if we understand it in the abstract. All immoral and ethically deficient actions (aka sins) have a distinct, definite character, a particular taste. But we cannot be sure that we always detect that taste buried among all the other flavors of life, especially considering the fact (which every sane man knows) that we have been fed on that taste all our life until our tongues are dull. Our only hope of truly and completely differentiating good from evil is if there were a perfectly good being standing outside of our world who had complete knowledge of it, of what it was supposed to be, of what it could be, of the consequences of every action and that being had given us some information--in other words, if God exists and has given us His Word. Only the Creator knows what people are supposed to be and so can say whether actions will destroy or fulfill their identity. And if such a revelation exists, it would only be logical for us to place it above our own moral ideas.

I said before that some people are angry with God because God (or at least religion, specifically Christianity) is immoral and leads people to immorality. My answer so far is this: because God is the transcendent Creator, outside of the world-process, all-knowing and all-wise, it makes sense that He would possess the knowledge necessary to instruct our moral instincts, showing us right and wrong in places where we would not otherwise see it. For a vast majority of people in this country (born after the year 2000), regardless of their religious persuasion, their intrinsic, instinctive feeling is that it is harsh and unfair to try to prevent or even persuade a gay person from having a gay relationship. But a large number of those people would not feel anything harsh or unfair about trying to prevent or persuade a suicidal person from committing suicide or about preventing and persuading a murderer from committing murder. Murder is still seen as a sin and suicide as, at least, a tragedy because we still see some value in life. But it is not inconceivable that if we saw the value of all things, we would see in other acts (apparently harmless) something as cruel as murder and as self-destructive as suicide. The Christian's insistence on placing God's word as the guide for morality is not arbitrary but only logical, since God (by definition) has the perfect knowledge necessary to inform our moral decisions.

But, if there is a God, the charge of immorality fails for another, more fundamental reason. God informs our moral decisions not simply because He knows more than us, as a parent may knows more than a child. God is not merely great but transcendent. What we call the “moral law” is not something which God has learned like us only better or which God applies (through superior knowledge) in a more efficient way. The moral law is simply an expression of the nature of God itself. To that a certain act is “right” is just a shorter way of saying that it is in accordance with the nature of God. We can deny God; we can reject Him. But we cannot escape Him, for He is the ground of our existence, and we cannot condemn Him for He is, in Himself, the only standard by which anything can be condemned. The only scales we have are God's scales and the only tools, God's tools. The greatest man, the greatest demigod, the greatest angel--all would be subject to the law and could conceivably be condemned by the law. But He-Who-Is-the-Law, the transcendent Law and Law-Giver, cannot be judged or condemned because there is nothing and no one to condemn Him but Himself.

And that is the answer to those who say: “Even if my sin is destroying me, why does it matter to God?” It matters to God because God is the law which differentiates good from evil which is why every wrong act is a sin against God and why God (and God alone) can avenge or forgive all sin. But not only is every sin a contradiction, an insult to God, but every sin involves God for we and everything we use to commit sin belongs to God. “Apart from God [a liar or a blasphemer] could not speak at all; there are no words not derived from the Word... [E]very sin is a distortion of an energy breathed into us... Hence all sin, whatever else it is, is sacrilege.” (Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, 69) Every thread of our life, material or conceptual, is derived from and has its existence in God. We have nothing of our own and so can only use God's materials even in order to sin.

In the first half of this article, I listed three reasons why sinners are angry with God, why the world holds Christianity at an arms length, when men avoid it or at least procrastinate their decision for it, putting it off until they have no choice, doing so only under the threat of eternal misery: (1) Because God is the enemy of our pleasure, (2) because God is the enemy of humanity and, especially of life, and (3) because God is the enemy of morality. So far, I have attempted to answer the third of those objections--because God is the transcendent Creator, He obviously knows more fully than we what would do good and harm to the world and to His creation; because God is the transcendent Law-Giver, He is the only standard by which anything can be judged moral or immoral in the first place; and because God is the transcendent source and ground of all things, He has the right to dictate and judge how we make use of the things which come from and exist in Him.

And having said that, it should be clear that this also shows us the answer to the second objection. God cannot be the enemy of humanity, because God is both the creator of and definer of humanity. If, in the manner of sci-fi, a power alien entity encountered Earth and decided to reform it by coercion and force, its demands might be good or bad but they would always be unwelcome and “alien” because they came from outside. But God is not merely more powerful than us but is the transcendent Creator who made man and made him in His own image. Human nature cannot be opposed to God because God is the one who created and defined human nature. Of course, human nature has been warped by sin and so cannot remain as it is. Humans were not made morally neutral but holy. In so far as humans are sinful they fail at being human. We may be born in sin but sin is a defect not an attribute of our nature. “This is the prime paradox of our religion; something that we have never in any full sense known, is not only better than ourselves, but even more natural to us than ourselves.” (Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Chapter 9)

Of course, as we come to God we will find our human values shaken up a good deal, but only because our knowledge of them is incomplete (and often corrupted.) The blessing on those who weep is a prime example. Weeping here stands for sadness and misery (whether expressed by literal tears or not). Human nature states that sadness and misery are bad and that joy and comfort are good. And Jesus does not disagree. The promise presupposes that. Those who are weep are blessed for one particular reason--that they will be comforted. The human feeling that weeping is bad is not wrong, but it doesn't go far enough, doesn't look forwards to the time when something presently bad may lead to and therefore become part of and transformed into something good. There are many different ways to understand the weeping and the comforting portrayed in this verse (and the similar concepts in the other beatitudes) and I'm not getting into that here--my point is simply that the weeping is not stated as good for its own sake but because it will give way to comfort. There is a truth here very deep and very profound, but it is not different in principle from the idea of delayed gratification and the fact (which every mature man knows) that sometimes present problems can lead to future joy. As the chorus says in Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, “From the ashes of disaster come the roses of success.” (And this may be what Solomon is getting at in Ecclesasties 7:1-3 as well, though this is less clear.) God's values do not negate human values but transmute them by infusing a new element, as light pouring through stained glass makes the glass something more but not intrinsically different from what stained glass is without light.

And that goes all the way to the matter of life and death. Christianity does not treat life as bad or death as good. According to Christianity, death is the consequence of sin. Jesus came to destroy the power of death and give us life. I believe it was Arthur Holmes who observed: "Death is a defeated enemy, but he is still an enemy." The story of Lazarus is actually a good example of this. Mary and Martha wept at Lazarus' death, even knowing that he would be resurrected at the last day. Jesus wept at Lazarus' death, even knowing that he would be resurrected in a few minutes. And this is because death is, objectively considered, a bad thing and having someone love die is, objectively considered, sad. If the world were "as heav'n hath intended," there would be no death. The natural human feeling that life is good and death is bad (and that a desire for death is unhealthy) is not wrong--but it is incomplete. Just as those who weep are blessed because they will be comforted, so those who die in Christ are blessed, because they will live again.

This world is like a kitchen where a great banquet is being prepared. The food you taste in the kitchen is real food, and what it tastes like is actually what it tastes like. But you can't really get a good feeling for what the final meal will taste like simply by sampling the food in the kitchen. For instance, who, on first tasting raw cocoa, would know that it was used to make deserts? Who would ever guess that something so bitter could, in a particular context, become something so sweet? We cannot taste the food in the banquet hall so long as we remain in the kitchen--so, while we remain, we must simply have faith in the chef and trust that the divergent ingredients will come together, because, after all, he is the chef.

We must affirm that life is good and death is bad. Otherwise, you would justify every murderer and defame every martyr--you would offer contempt to every man who has ever died that something else might live. And yet death, in the will of God, may also be something good. That was why St. Paul said he was perfectly content to live or to die so long as he was with Christ. We don't know how Lazarus felt coming out of the tomb, but I believe he was happy because he was doing the will of God. We do not know what Lazarus experienced between his death and resurrection--if he experienced any of the joys of Heaven (which I confessedly find unlikely but the point cannot be proven one way or the other), he may have found it a sacrifice to return to Earth, but it was a sacrifice he made for the sake of God's work. And because death is bad and life is good, his return to life should not be seen as a tragedy--the joy his family and friends felt at his return was, perhaps incomplete, but it was not wrong--it was a fitting picture of what God was trying to do, of what God did (in the Resurrection of Jesus shortly afterwards), and of what God will do for all His people someday.

I repeat, then, that God does not destroy human values, but rather adds to them, giving them a new context and, in some cases, a new meaning. But in reality, even that isn't quite the right way to put it. We can neither compare nor contrast God's values with man's values in a real sense for a very fundamental reason. One of the scriptures I mentioned earlier as proof of Christianity's supposed nihilism was Luke 14:26, in which Christ says: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” Anyone who knows the Bible realizes this is partly rhetorical. The Bible elsewhere commands us to love everyone, even specifically some of those we are told to hate here. The idea  is that Jesus calls us to have a love and devotion so complete that it might lead us (in particular circumstances) to act as if we hated our family--for instance, a man might be called to follow Jesus to a distant place and leave his siblings and parents behind just as a man who hated his family would do even though, in his case, the motive would be different. But even with this qualification, the commandment seems not just shocking but wrong. It seems almost immoral that even God could come between a father and his child, that a man should love even God more than his wife. I remember once being in a Sunday School class in which one of the women of the church was talking about her husband, who was not a Christian. She said something to this affect: “I'm going to follow God no matter what he does. It wouldn't do him any good for me to go to Hell with him.” At first, I felt just a bit of shock, but after I thought about it, I realized she was right, right on a very fundamental level--because God is transcendent. The things of this world can put themselves in competition with God, but God can never be in competition with them. We cannot turn from God to give “love” (in any meaningful sense) to something else because God is love. The more we love God the more we are able to love other people. We can say that we are leaving God for the sake of “love” of some person, but if we have turned from God it is no longer love. Nobody will go to hell through love because, as Charles Wesley said, “Love is heaven.” (“O For a Thousand Tongues”) There is no competition between “human love” and “divine love” in reality (though certainly, they will often seem to compete in our perception) because God is the Creator and the original image of humanity, the originator and definer of values. Any love which is not truly divine love is not truly love. Henry van Dyke put it: “All who live in love are Thine.” (“Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee”)

But what then do we do with the obvious fact that many people who are not Christians do seem to exercise a genuine and even sacrificial love? Jesus stated that the greatest kind of love is that in which a man would sacrifice his life for his friends. (John 15:13) Jesus is speaking of Himself and His supreme sacrifice, but it is true on a lower level that there have been people who were willing to sacrifice their own life for the sake of their friends--and that not all of them have been Christians or even, generally speaking, good people. How can we make sense of this?

Once again, sci-fi may help us understand this. In Superman #164 (October 1963), Superman was on a distant planet fighting a duel with his arch-enemy, the criminal scientist Lex Luthor. During the battle, they were separated, and Luthor stumbled upon a city of the alien inhabitants of the planet. Hoping to gain their help, he pretends to be a hero and helps the people in various ways. His ploy works and the people hail Luthor as a hero and gladly assist him. This creates an interesting situation. Luthor was a villain and not a hero and his motivations were entirely selfish, and yet the deeds he did were those a hero would do. He did genuinely help people who needed help. In so far as he did that, he was a hero and worthy of the admiration people gave him. But in so far as he was doing everything for his own selfish ambition, he was not. We can honestly say that the things he did were right, while also affirming that he himself was not a good person. This is fairly straightforward, because, in this case, Luthor was fully conscious of exactly what he was doing, completely aware of his own duplicity. But by the end of the story, there had been a change. Because the people on that planet saw him as a hero, Luthor ended up actually doing one truly heroic and selfless act for their sake, sacrificing his freedom to help them.  How much of his motivation was truly good and how much was still selfish? Only the writers know for sure.

And that is the position human beings are in. How much, say, of a mother's love for her child is purely instinctively or a result of societal expectations or born of self-interest and how much is truly love? Only God knows for sure. As fallen humans, we are entangled in a mesh of our own sinful motives which is our inheritance. But we are entangled in the grace of God, without which we would irredeemable and unbearable, the barely-human spawn of Hell. And so we are here, a savage noble “darkly wise and rudely great,” the image of God scrawled with the graffiti of Satan. In every noble act, in every heroic sacrifice, in every moment of tender and familial love--who can judge and say how much is true and good and how much is selfish and how much merely natural? The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked--only God can understand it, for God is the maker and the searcher of hearts. We most certainly can't and so must content ourselves by praising the act for what it is.

Every truly good act, whatever the motive, has something of God in it for all good things come from God. And therefore it has two tremendous possibilities--one of good and one of evil. The evil is that a man may come to rest in the goodness of the act. The world is full of those who were content to do good without being good--and so have ended by doing evil. But there is another possibility and that is in the goodness of the act a man may see the face of God--may be led from the essential goodness of the act to seek for further and greater good. George MacDonald said that for a man to love his brother simply for the fact that he is his brother is very deficient attitude--but if we never started by loving our brother we would never learn to love anyone else. But if we never go beyond mere brotherly love, that love itself will most likely spoil. (“Love Thy Neighbour”) Certain Christians do speak as if human morality could be something separate from and unrelated to Christian morality--even as if it could be in competition--that doing justly and loving mercy could be a distraction from walking humbly with our God. But since all goodness comes from God, pursuing goodness can never lead anywhere but God. (Though make no mistake that Satan fools many people into thinking they are pursuing goodness just because they like the sound of the word.) In Jeremiah 22:15-16, God rebukes the king of Judah for not acting as godly king Josiah, who did “judgment and justice” and “judged the cause of the poor and the needy.” And the God adds: “was not this to know me?” To do right is to know God (the source and meaning of right) and to know God is to do right. We have no choice between human morality and Divine morality, but between morality and immorality which is just a more abstract and philosophical way of saying that the choice is between following God and rebelling against Him whether we yet fully recognize Him or not.

God is the transcendent Creator, the fountain and definition of all values and in Him we live and move and have our being. We cannot escape Him--we can only follow Him or turn from Him. Our values must be His values, or else they are only empty and meaningless words. Our goodness must be His goodness, or else it is only hypocrisy. Our truth must be His truth, or else it will be a lie. And that is why Presuppositional Apologetics is fundamentally wrong. The contention that a sinner's mind is a foreign mental world with no “neutral ground” with the Christian assumes that sinful man has the power to create his own mental world. But sin has no creative power and the mental powers come from God. Man could not think at all except for the reason of God being operative within his mind. There is no “neutral ground” because all the ground belongs to God--for the mental earth, just as much as the physical earth, is the Lord's and the fulness thereof.

And ironically, once again, the argument comes full circle. For once we understand the transcendence of God, we will see that the first objection of the angry sinners fails as well--the charge that God is the enemy of pleasure. Of course, here the sinners have the strongest case. Nobody questions that following God necessitates denying many of our human desires (at least in specific contexts)--that following God may lead a man into many unpleasant circumstances and may require many sacrifices. But that doesn't change the fact that pleasure is, by definition, good and pain and sacrifice are bad. And if it is good, then it must come from God. Lewis's Pilgrim's Regress tells of a man named John who sets out in pursuit of “sweet desire,” searching for an island he once saw. However, on his journey, he becomes increasingly burdened by a sense of duty to his Landlord (who represents God). Near the point of the climax, John speaks to another character who tries to convince him to follow the Landlord and that, in so doing, he will find the object of his desire. John's initial response is this: “Perhaps what troubles me is a fear that my desires, after all you have said, do not really come from the Landlord--that there is some older and rival Beauty in the world which the Landlord will not allow me to get.” (155) That is the attitude of the angry sinner, of the procrastinator--believing that there is something good in the world to be found outside of God, something good they can get on their own terms--something which, if not better than God, almost as good and much cheaper. But it is false. All goodness, even pleasure, comes from God and so can only be found by following Him. It is not that God stubbornly refuses to allow us to pleasure without following him. “God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.” (Lewis, Mere Christianity, 54) Because God is the transcendent Creator, there is no pleasure except in what He creates. We can find pleasure in the world simply because the world was made by God, even if it has rebelled against Him. That is why the pleasures of sin are only for a season, because pleasure and sin are intrinsically incompatible. Those who live for pleasure are not the happiest of men, even on a natural level, because they are pursuing one thing without understanding what it even is. A man who enjoys the sugar so much that he eats it plain and refuses all other deserts does not get the best food--he would do much better to trust the chief to put all the ingredients in their right relations. The point is that God is the source of all good, even to the most basic pleasure. God cannot be the enemy of happiness because He is the source of happiness. (And if he requires unhappiness of us it is only a prerequisite to happiness, as death is a prerequisite to resurrection.) Paris Reidhead spent a great deal of time in his famous sermon discussing whether the end of God's plan was the glory of God or the happiness of man. But if we knew all, we would realize those are two different ways of saying the same thing. It was to the glory of God that He provided happiness for man, and the only happiness for man comes through experiencing the glory of God.

Many people in the world are angry with God or, at the very least, want to avoid any contact with him until the last possible moment. They feel that God is the enemy of happiness, of humanity, and of morality--and some Christians have, to be fair, given them some encouragement for thinking that. But because God is the transcendent Creator, He is the source of morality, of humanity, and of happiness. Far from God being our enemy, we are His enemy and, therefore, our own enemy. Because the source and end of our being lies in God, every step away from Him also takes us farther from ourselves into the empty wastes of dissolution and damnation.

But to say that God is transcendent is not quite the whole story. If it were, we would be left with a problem. It is a great comfort to know that there is a transcendent God who gives meaning to the world--but it doesn't seem to help us all that much. The fact that morality comes from God only makes harsher the harsh reality of our own failures.

When I chose this title--“God in the Hands of Angry Sinners”--I meant it ironically. Since God is the source of values and the definer of reality, we can never have grounds to be angry with Him and we can certainly never “get our hands on Him.” But after I chose it, I realized it was ironic in a different way. For, once, the impossible happened. Once man did get his hands on God. Once God was, literally, in the hands of angry sinners who beat Him and mocked Him and murdered Him. God is the transcendent Creator and He is nevertheless (or therefore?) the incarnate Redeemer. The source and meaning of justice bore in His body the marks of injustice and therefore we all may, through faith in Him, be justified. The living God died so that we dying men might live forever. Light essential was buried in darkness so that the “darkness shall turn to dawning,/And the dawning to noonday bright.” (H. E. Nichol)